Robin's 80th Birthday Speech, Part 4 Israel Palestine

Friends I referred earlier to the booklet “Challenges facing Israel at 60” which I published after a trip to Israel in 2007 for the wedding of my niece.

I took the opportunity of this trip to visit a number of grantees of the New Israel Fund of which Machsom Watch an organisation of dedicated volunteers, mainly middle aged women, who endeavour to monitor the treatment of Palestinians by the military, particularly at the many checkpoints they need to cross when moving from one town or village on the West Bank to another.

We observed many examples of the oppressive nature of the occupation but I shall give here just one example.

We saw a school child aged between 10 and 12 years waiting at a gate some 50 metres from the checkpoint for a signal from the soldier to proceed. Daphne, our guide, spoke to the soldier who then allowed the child through. But Daphne explained that that had she not been there the soldier would have made the child wait half an hour in the hot sun.

When back in Melbourne I spoke about my experiences at a number of social gatherings and was taken aback by the hostility shown by some members of the community to my reports. Clearly they did not want to hear this unpleasant news. There were even charges made to my loyalty to the State of Israel. Some of the remarks made were very, very ugly.

So I want to make it very clear the support which my family has provided to the creation of the State of Israel. I will quote from prominent Jewish historian Philip Mendes who has written, concerning the Jewish Council to combat fascism and anti-Semitism, an organisation in which both my parents were active members:

“As early as 1945, the Jewish Council expressed its support for a Jewish national home in Palestine. A pamphlet by Evelyn Rothfield, the information officer of the Jewish Council, called for free Jewish immigration into Palestine, and the establishment of a Jewish Commonwealth. A further pamphlet issued by the Council in March 1947 titled Whither Palestine was issued with a supportive foreword by the Victorian Attorney General William Slater. This pamphlet firmly attacked the British White Paper on immigration, defended the right of the large number of homeless and displaced Jews to enter Palestine, and attributed Arab-Jewish conflict to the malign influence of exploitative Arab landowners, and the extremist Mufti of Jerusalem who had collaborated with the Nazis. The pamphlet called for Arab-Jewish friendship and cooperation in an independent Palestine.

The Council also distributed 25,000 copies of a pro-Israel pamphlet, Israel Reborn, in 1948. The pamphlet argued that the only Arabs who opposed partition were the feudal landlords and chieftains from surrounding countries who ‘fear the progress and enlightenment which the Jews have brought to the Middle East’. The Council organised a petition in favour of immediate Australian recognition of Israel.”

Friends I would now like to quote from a section of Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence:

“The State of Israel will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.”

I would now like to turn specifically to the question of the occupation.
Ehud Barak, former Prime Minister and former Minister for Defence, addressed a security conference in Herzliya last November. Barak spoke for 30 minutes but I have managed to condense this to just under 2 minutes to get the essential point about Israel’s security.

Essentially what Barak said is that in the opinion of 80 – 90% of Israel’s defence and intelligence establishment, Israel would be better able to defend itself from the recognised international borders rather than the current borders.

Late last November Colonel Shaul Arieli was in Australia as guest of the New Israel Fund. Colonel Arieli was head of the Interim Agreement Administration under the Rabin government, and head of the Peace Administration in the Barak Government.

One of Colonel Arieli’s interesting observations was regarding projections of the population of Israel and Palestine combined ( i.e. the territory sometimes referred to as the Land of Israel being all the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River ( see map and note that the Mediterranean is to the left of Israel and the Jordan river is the vertical line in bold. Note that the bulge to the left of the Jordan river is the occupied West Bank.)

The projections indicate that by 2050 the proportion of the population which is Jewish will be one third only. Colonel Arieli goes on to make the point that the land of Israel will be neither Zionist or democratic.

I decided to investigate this scenario more deeply and came across the following table:

Population of Israel and Palestine (from the Mediteranean to the Jordan river) 

Percentage predicted to be Jewish in 2050

Fertility  rate assumption	Percentage
High	28
Medium	37
Low	47.5

Source: Israel National  Security Project and Professor Sergio Della Pergola

Professor Pergola is Israel’s top demographer.
The proportion of the population expected to be Jewish depends on assumptions of fertility but under all assumptions the proportion will be less than 50%. This backs up Col Shaul Arieli’s assertion that Israel will be neither Zionist nor democratic. Not Zionist because Jews will be in a minority and not democratic because Palestinians in the occupied territories do not have the vote.

So we can now confidently assert that not only is the occupation contrary to Israel’s defence interests but that the occupation is also contrary to the dreams of the founders of modern Zionism that one day there would be a state which could serve as a sanctuary for Jews world wide who had nowhere else to go. That dream can only be fulfilled if Israel recognises the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and agrees to a 2 state solution.

Thank you!